The Concerning The Visual Experience And The User Base

By Author: Mike Jones
Total Articles: 255
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The rest of the book consists of calls to consider a series of additional issues from the user's perspective, along with some declaratory statements of the authors' outlook on image-collection building. One of the issues the authors raise is that once something is classified or described, further thought on what the image is about or in what other collection it might properly be placed tends to stop, and, given the far larger number of people who might look for that image, this pigeonholing is a bad thing. This mode of thought spills over into Replica Breitling the next issue, which is that collections are generally based on preconceived notions of how images or other objects should be arranged and that this does not reflect how images are searched for or thought of by the users.

The authors find that the efforts made to accommodate users in searching large image databases have, to date, been based largely on the use of keywords that have been assigned by experts, which gets us right back into the aforementioned problems. Greisdorf and O'Connor ...
... write, "We would suggest not as search engine designers, but as image viewers and retrievers that more attention be given to how people think about images and less to ways of designing more effective programming algorithms for searching words". The book ends with two statements concerning the visual experience and the user base. First, say the authors, the visual experience is the sum of the total observation, consisting of the various focal points in an image and the total viewed field, the interpretation of the observation which includes such things as etymological, emotional, and experiential viewpoints and the words used to express both. Second, the user base can be divided into four groups: (1) "I see it and I don't need to understand it," (2) "I see it and I'd like to know more about it," (3) "I see it and I'd like to see more like it," and (4) "I see it, I'd like to know more about it, and then I'd like to Breitling Replica Watches see others related to that knowledge". Both the individual viewer experience and the expectations of groups of users are starting to become the primary guides by which image collections are being described.

This book can be used as a text in an information organization course or in a setting in which the asking of questions vis-a-vis image collections would generate discussion and debate. There are problems with the book, some minor (the text occasionally refers to colors in its numerous images, which are printed in gray scale) and some more troublesome (the citation format in the book is haphazard at best, cutting off promising avenues of inquiry). But on the whole, Greisdorf and O'Connor ask several questions that are at the center of the debate in image indexing and collection and in the ongoing debate of the proper place of user-centered design in general. Their book serves as a good supplement to more formal texts concerned with images in general, showing that the emperor that is, traditional image collection occasionally has no clothes.